


Daydream

by boychik



Category: Bakuman
Genre: Fluff, Gen, M/M, Sudden random onset of Bakuman nostalgia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-04
Updated: 2013-11-04
Packaged: 2017-12-31 11:01:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1030917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boychik/pseuds/boychik
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even before he learns about Mashiro and Azuki, Shujin knows. The simple essence of Mashiro automatically gives it away.</p><p>“You’re a flesh and blood man, aren’t you?” Shujin asks Mashiro. “Or do you bleed ink, too?” Shujin, a grinning pair of dark-rimmed glasses, swims into Mashiro’s view. “You do have a girlfriend, right?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Daydream

Even before he learns about Mashiro and Azuki, Shujin knows. The simple essence of Mashiro automatically gives it away.

“You’re a flesh and blood man, aren’t you?” Shujin asks Mashiro. “Or do you bleed ink, too?” Shujin, a grinning pair of dark-rimmed glasses, swims into Mashiro’s view. “You do have a girlfriend, right?”

The wind is blowing up on the roof, lifting the longest strands of hair at the back of Mashiro’s head up and down. Something about the way the hairs move stirs a certain calm in Shujin, but something else wells up inside him: a barely repressible urge to reach over and ruffle Mashiro’s hair. He refrains because of another something about the way Mashiro looks at that exact moment in time, a peculiar stillness imbued with life. Shujin sees Mashiro as Mashiro might see himself: in a single splash panel, a small figure cleverly drawn in india inks, full Copic color, the sky and the concrete bleeding out over the edges of the paper, implying a universe beyond its borders.

(Is he spending too much time at the studio? Maybe. But too much still meant not enough…) 

This is Mashiro, quietly sitting on the roof, legs folded at a forty-five degree angle. This is Mashiro, gently biting his lip as he squints at the sun. This is Mashiro, with the glint in his eye that Shujin knows means he’s daydreaming again. Shujin wants to save the moment somehow, on paper, film, even just one image, whatever so long as the tableau is not left to replay in his faulty mind. Things will fracture there; the color will shift if only imperceptibly. The temperature will change. He knows he can’t preserve this image called _Saiko daydreaming and biting his lip on the roof_ , and almost dreads the passing of the wind, the motion of the fat clouds in the flat blue sky, the seconds slipping away before Moritaka Mashiro turns around and answers his question.

If Shujin hadn’t spoken, he wouldn’t have to face this. But time would have raced on along anyway, and where would he be? In the same place, more or less. He could have seen this procession of processed images, color and motion and form vast across the back of his brain, for a minute longer. But Shujin knows as he knows about Azuki in the space between when Mashiro opens his mouth and when the words come tumbling out that there’s nothing this scene needed less than one more word balloon blocking the sky.


End file.
